


if all our life is but

by formerlydf



Category: Bandom, Panic! at the Disco
Genre: Alternate Universe, Dreamfic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-11-30
Updated: 2008-11-30
Packaged: 2018-04-20 13:14:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4788500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/formerlydf/pseuds/formerlydf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ryan's English teacher says that ambivalence is a mark of greatness in poetry. If Ryan were a poem, he would be great. As a person, he's nothing special.</p>
<p>(Or: Ryan is sleeping too much, and there are these boys.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	if all our life is but

**Author's Note:**

> For [clarityhiding](http://archiveofourown.org/users/clarityhiding/pseuds/clarityhiding), who is now contractually obligated to write me clerkfic. Thanks to [annon_of_rhi](http://archiveofourown.org/users/wantstothrill/pseuds/wantstothrill) for reassuring me that it was not far too absurd to exist. (Also, thanks to [hapakitsune](http://archiveofourown.org/users/hapakitsune/pseuds/hapakitsune), who I feel is in some way probably to blame for everything I write. ♥) Title from Northern Downpour.
> 
> [Originally posted [on LJ.](http://formerlydf.livejournal.com/126878.html)]

Every morning, Ryan feels like he's lost something. He's hazy, foggy, when it's that early, his mind too full of nonsensical words and vague flashes of feeling. When he rolls out of bed and onto his feet, the room spins, but he never manages to open his eyes in time to see it whirling.

It takes him a while — a few seconds, and seconds are everything in the morning — to catalogue, make sure that everything is in its proper place. Arms, legs, hands, feet, dick. Still got his clothes, his bed, the posters on the walls of his pigeon-hole of a room.

Then his mind clears up a little and he remembers that this is always the way he feels when he's just woken up,like he was reaching for something when he was dreaming, but his eyelids fluttered open to ragged sunlight just as he had been about to grab it.

 

 

Ryan drifts off in math class, because the constant stream of numbers just doesn't seem important enough to pay attention to. One plus one is two; two times two is four; four squared is sixteen, not that game that the girls play on the blacktop during recess. X squared minus sixteen is a difference of squares equals X minus four times X plus four equals sixteen four squared two two one.

Spencer likes math, but Ryan doesn't. Ryan likes English, but Spencer doesn't, not really, except for certain poems because they have a nice rhythm. It's the meter, Ryan told him once, twice, but Spencer just calls it the heartbeat and doesn't care about the real term.

Iambic pentameter, Ryan told him, Shakespeare used it; Spencer asked, was he the one who compared someone to summer? Because really, that's kind of weird.

Spencer doesn't like metaphors. He doesn't see the point, he tells Ryan every time; why can't people just say what they mean? He —

"Ryan!" Mr. Elwood shouts, and Ryan jerks his head up, his elbows flailing wildly before he regains control. Mr. Elwood stands at the front of the classroom, his posture perfectly straight in a way that Ryan could never emulate. He's twelve years old, and his body seems to have fallen into a permanent slouch, his elbows tucked in close to his sides so they can't do any damage. His angles are sharp. "Obviously you don't find math the most interesting subject, but you could at least try not to fall asleep."

For a math teacher, Mr. Elwood uses a lot of words. Ryan appreciates this anomaly. "'M not asleep," he says, opening his eyes wide. They start to sting after a few seconds, feeling bizarrely cold, and he blinks quickly.

"Could've fooled me," Mr. Elwood says, frowning. "Now pay attention." He turns back to the whiteboard and picks up the dry erase marker again, uncapping it and taking a discreet sniff of the fumes. Ryan looks down, but he can hear the marker squeak out variables again, turning the dingy whiteboard into a red-streaked mathematical Eden.

When he's convinced that Mr. Elwood is too absorbed by his work to turn around, Ryan slouches down again, lowering his gaze until he's staring at the ugly blue carpeting on the floor. He tries to recapture his train of thought; someone said — what? Which someone? When did he say it? What did he say?

 

 

"Ryan," Brendon says lightly, before saying it loudly. "Ryan!"

He sounds worried. Ryan doesn't know why. He's always like this. (Ryan's not entirely sure who he meant by that "he". Maybe it doesn't matter, because they're both always like this. Ryan is quiet, and withdrawn, and maladjusted, and Brendon is loud and concerned. Except for when they're not, because nobody is always the same, which would make Ryan's previous statement false and so make Ryan a liar. That's okay, though; if he doesn't say it out loud, it doesn't count as a lie.)

"Shh," Ryan hisses at Brendon. "I don't exist today."

"So how come I can talk to you, then?" Brendon challenges. Of course he does. Brendon is full of questions, because he hates answering them.

"I don't know," Ryan says, frowning. He feels very aware of his eyebrows when he frowns, especially the little pinch between them. It almost gives him a headache sometimes, if he's frowning hard enough. "Magic."

"Okay," Brendon says graciously, letting that one slip past without grabbing onto it. "Can I not exist with you, then?"

"I don't think you exist anyway," Ryan grumbles. "Maybe you're just a hallucination sent by my subconscious to torment me."

Brendon huffs out a laugh and elbows Ryan, grinning. "All lies. Now come on, Ross, shut up. We're not existing."

He pulls Ryan down so they're both sitting on the floor, and they stop existing for a while.

 

 

Ryan makes himself breakfast every morning, if a piece of toast can be called breakfast. Once every so often it's a toaster waffle, half-heated. His stomach used to start growling halfway to lunch, but now he's used to it. Anyway, he buys a lot of junk food from the gas station on his way home to make up for it.

Occasionally he doesn't eat breakfast; anything that lets him sleep later and get out of the house faster is automatically a good idea. Seconds are everything in the morning. Sometimes, if he's lucky, he can get out of the house without seeing his father at all. If he's luckier, he's still half-asleep for most of the journey to school.

He doesn't even pack lunch, he's that desperate to keep his morning preparations short, which means that he's usually stuck eating cafeteria swill with Brent and Trevor. Brent and Trevor inevitably mutter among themselves while Ryan slumps in on himself, staring at the contrast between his splayed hand and the faded plastic tabletop. It's an unappealing mix of grey, beige, and faint hints of blue; the corners are beginning to crack and split, so that bored students can dedicate Herculean effort to pulling pieces of the outer shell off.

There's a mustard stain that peeks out from between Ryan's middle and ring fingers; it looks like someone spilled a highlighter, but Ryan knows it's mustard because he was sitting in this exact spot when Trevor created it by accidentally squeezing the stale bun of his rubbery hot dog a little too hard. That was last year.

Sometimes Ryan joins in the muttered conversation and says, "Yeah, she's hot," or, "Hey, did you get that game yet?" or, "Dude, she gave us so much fucking homework tonight." He knows how to hang out with Brent and Trevor, learned it like he learned how to skateboard, just hanging out in one of their driveways. (Not Ryan's own.)

The skateboard is actually harder to maneuver; Ryan has problems with gravity, sometimes.

 

 

When Ryan's mom left, his heart started dropping. At first it was in the normal place, but after a week, Ryan could feel it crawling down to rest in his stomach. By the end of the year, it was in his toes, and his feet were beginning to leave the ground.

That's a metaphor, thus it simultaneously means everything and nothing at all. His heart was never actually in his toes. That would be biologically impossible. However, it does describe how he feels sometimes: dizzy: disconnected. It's worst at the end of the day, but then he falls asleep and when he wakes up, he's almost normal again.

That's part of the reason why he reads so much. If he's going to disconnect from reality, he might as well do it in the accepted fashion. Mostly, though, it's just because he likes the words, the sharp and rounded letters curving off the page to settle behind his eyes.

 

 

Ryan tries to teach himself to play guitar. It works, a little, in that he eventually figures out how to play along to some of his favorite songs. Sometimes he hums along to the lyrics if it doesn't distract him from his fingers too much.

He's only been playing for a year and a half, maybe a little more, and he's not bad — he's maybe pretty good — but he's not amazing, either. Not good enough to make his lazy fantasy of starting a band anything more substantive. ( _Lazy son of a bitch, can't do shit, you'll never do anything —_ )

There would be no point to telling anyone, not even Brent and Trevor, so he doesn't bother. There's a myriad of fourteen-year-olds who play guitar semi-well, and hardly any of them will ever do anything with it. Success is for people with actual talent. Ryan can't just pick up a fucking instrument and play it, not like —

He's lost his train of thought. Settled in his room, Ryan picks up his guitar and settles it in his lap, picking out the G major scale slowly. He hears the TV turn on downstairs, the noise of the news drifting only faintly through his locked door. The door is locked, but the window is open (contrast: does it mean anything?), and it's getting colder as it gets darker. Vegas is a desert, but that doesn't mean that it's always blisteringly hot. This is the Vegas that nobody from the outside knows. (Let's change the subject now.)

Ryan shifts to the G minor scale, then moves up two frets to A minor. His mind is so full of words all the time that sometimes it's nice to sink back into simple letters — F, B, Cm — and the ache of not-calloused-enough fingertips. It's almost like he's in a trance, cut off from everything real, especially the muted noise swimming up from the living room. It's calm.

He wonders if this is how Jon feels all the time.

Ryan shifts absently to Anna Begins, only fumbling on one or two chords, he's mostly certain. He doesn't have the music in front of him. He should check, so maybe he can teach it to Brendon, even though Brendon's parents won't buy him a guitar yet.

Something crashes downstairs, but Ryan doesn't hurry to investigate. He realises in a flash that his fingers haven't been moving for a while, still locked on the last chord of Anna Begins. The clock on his table blinks out the time, green letters stuttering the semaphore of eleven twenty-three. He started practicing at ten fifty-two. What the hell was he thinking about for so long?

 

 

Spencer arrives first, which isn't surprising, because Spencer is the Responsible One. Sometimes. Sometimes Spencer is responsible, and sometimes he's the one who makes Ryan do the stupidest shit ever, except it doesn't matter because nobody but the four of them ever finds out, anyway.

Anyway.

Spencer is there first, but Ryan gets there not too long after him. He knows it isn't too long because Spencer is still waiting patiently. In a couple minutes, he would have been eye-rollingly annoyed; if Ryan was really late, Spencer would veer between worried and pissed off, would start off with a, "What the fuck?" instead of what he says this time, which is, "Hey, Ryan."

"Hey," Ryan says, letting himself drop to the ground next to where Spencer is sitting. His bones feel loose.

"Fucking shitty day," Spencer grumbles, rolling his feet around. Point, flex, one foot goes right, the other goes left, up, down. Ryan wonders if people realise that Spencer is always moving. Not as much as Brendon — not as obviously as Brendon — but in motion.

Kinetic energy, Jon says, and Ryan says, you know I fucking hate science.

"'swrong?" Ryan asks. He tries to lie down slowly without using his hands to support him; his stomach muscles tighten briefly before he just gives up and falls back, his shoulders hitting the ground.

That's not a metaphor. Probably.

"Ugh. Nothing," Spencer says, twisting his head so he can look at Ryan. "School. Parents. You know."

Ryan blinks slowly, absurdly conscious of his eyelids. "Sure," he says.

"Not — I mean." Spencer sighs and lies down as well, rubbing his hand over his eyes. He looks almost sick, the faint freckles on his skin standing out much more than they usually do. "Never mind."

"No, I know," Ryan tells him. They don't talk much about parents. Spencer and Jon and Brendon usually don't have that much to say. Ryan doesn't want to say it. It's not like much has changed for the past two years, anyway. They know what he means when he stops talking.

"Ross, Smith," Brendon says, his footsteps almost — not quite — echoing as he walks towards them. Ryan shifts over to his side and watches as Brendon's feet are joined by Brendon's hands and Brendon's ass. Eventually, Brendon finishes sitting down and then drops back dramatically, lying down with his hands behind his head.

"Hi," Ryan says.

"Hi," Brendon says.

"Uh, hi?" Spencer asks. "Are we all just going to be greeting each other for a while?"

"Well, Jon's coming," Brendon informs him with a horizontal shrug. "Unless we want to ignore him when he gets here."

"Dickface," Spencer says. Spencer is Responsible, but not always terribly Respectful. Ryan wonders if he ever acts this way around his mother.

"I'll stick my dick in your face," Brendon challenges. That's nice; Brendon wouldn't have said that a year ago. Two years? Three? How long have they been friends again, besides always?

Brendon wouldn't talk like that around his mother, Ryan knows, but then again Brendon has had more to not say about his parents recently. It might be Ryan's fault, Ryan's and Spencer's and Jon's. Then again, it's been so long that it's hard to figure out where blame goes. This connects to that, which is part of something else, which has been going on for ten years.

"I stuck my dick in your mom's face last night," Jon says, dropping down on the other side of Brendon. Jon is not always last. If he were, if this all went in a pattern, maybe Ryan could try to quantify it. It would represent something.

It doesn't, though. Even Spencer doesn't always arrive first.

"Jon fucking Walker!" Brendon shouts, kicking Jon's leg lightly, while Spencer shifts closer to Ryan and laughs, his breath dusting across Ryan's back.

Ryan doesn't really understand it, not completely. It's like gravity, almost, because it's there, it's always been there, but he doesn't think anyone has any good explanations for it. (And if he said that it helps keep his feet on the ground, would that be too cliche? Probably, which is the problem with life. So much of everything true is cliche.)

 

 

Ryan gets elbowed in gym class, and he shifts to let Danny Tyler run past him. Brent says that anyone with two last names is a dickhead. Trevor says that Brent is a dickhead. Ryan says that they're both dickheads, when he's paying enough attention to respond.

Danny Tyler bursts ahead, and another elbow hits Ryan's ribs. It's Omar Leif, this time. Next it will probably be Noah O'Connell, and then Adam Mostin. It's not like they really mean to hurt him, or anything. It's not like Ryan cares. He just falls asleep, and he feels better when he wakes up. Maybe his mother was right when she said — used to say, a long time ago — that all he needed was a good night's rest, no matter what ailed him. No, he doesn't like the idea of his mother being right. And yet.

He has a few bruises sprinkled over his body like colorful birthmarks, in varying shades of red-purple-green-yellow. Some of them are from gym class, but that's just because Ryan bruises easily. He bruises a lot. He falls down a lot.

Sarah Cohen slants a glance at him out of the corner of her eye and giggles with Maura Leonard; their laughter is a little sharp, off-key. They called him a fag yesterday in the hallway. It was a joke, or maybe it wasn't.

He knows what he is; he's fifteen years old and too thin for his age or his height. He reads too much and he writes poetry and he uses words that other people don't know the meanings of, when he bothers to speak at all. Outside of class, he doesn't talk to anyone except Brent and Trevor. The ends of his hair brush his earlobes and are slowly growing down to his shoulders. His hands are too long, his voice is too quiet, his shirts would be too tight if he weighed just a little bit more.

But at least he's well-rested.

 

 

Jon is lying back on the ground, propped up by his elbows, when Ryan arrives. "Ross, my man," he says with a nod. "How's it hanging?"

Ryan shrugs and tries to sit down without letting his knees get in the way. He hits his elbow on his shin, but eventually untangles himself to the soundtrack of Jon's light laughter. Jon even laughs nicely. Ryan wonders what it would be like to go to school with him.

"Fine, I guess," he says. He rests his hand on his knee and flexes his foot, just to feel the muscles shift. Maybe if he was — not here, maybe if he was not here, he would look for the symbolism in that. Here, it's just something he does. It's just normal. "I mean. My dad isn't exactly happy. I got a B minus in history this semester."

"Is he ever happy?" Jon asks, his voice empty of anything that might be construed as pity, or judgement. Only God can judge, and Ryan's heard that God is dead. It might be true, or it might not. You can't believe everything you read.

Jeez, Ryan, Brendon laughs, and Ryan asks, what? What did I say?

"Not really, no," Ryan admits. He can do that here. Brent and Trevor don't ask about his dad, not anymore. And it feels so strange, thinking of Brent and Trevor here.

Jon hums and reaches behind himself, pulling out a guitar. Ryan didn't see it before, but that doesn't mean anything. "Wanna jam? I was playing with Brendon earlier, but he had to go. He said he might be back later, if he can."

"Sounds good," Ryan says, feeling around for his own guitar.

 

 

Ryan is bored by English class. He's bored by the stupid discussions with all the stupid students and their stupid, stupid opinions. He's bored by the word stupid. Moronic discussions with blockheaded, gormless idiots pretending that they want to be educated, and spewing out their inane, obtuse opinions.

He doesn't want to have to put in effort, but he wants the work to be more challenging. Does that make sense? No, probably not, except in a literary sense, or maybe in all senses.

ambivalence - n., uncertainty or fluctuation, esp. when caused by inability to make a choice or by a simultaneous desire to say or do two opposite or conflicting things.

Ryan's English teacher says that ambivalence is a mark of greatness in poetry. If Ryan were a poem, he would be great. As a person, he's nothing special.

Here is how he feels: like all this pulling in conflicting directions is keeping him in the same place. Or is he being pulled at all? Ambivalent or apathetic, either way; he's stagnant, unmoving, in stasis. What does he do, anyway? He wakes up, he eats, he pretends to learn, he eats, he pretends to learn, he goes home, he eats, he goes to sleep.

Here is the push: he wakes up every morning. And here is the pull: he goes to sleep every night.

And here is Ryan: not moving. Not unless the push gets weaker, and the pull gets stronger.

 

 

"Fucking hell," Spencer mutters, kicking the ground before exhaling angrily and sitting. "Fucking school."

Ryan was here first, this time. Jon came second; they're still waiting on Brendon. He'll get here eventually, Ryan knows. They all know. None of them have ever missed a night. Why would they?

"Problems?" Jon asks languorously, wiggling his toes slowly and watching them move. His flip flops lie abandoned to one side.

"How the hell am I supposed to write an essay on the Great Gatsby when she hardly ever talked about it in class?" Spencer demands. He sat close to Ryan when he dropped down, close enough that now he just lists over to the side and lets their arms bump. Without even thinking, Ryan shifts his chest so Spencer can let his head drop onto Ryan's shoulder.

"It's all about the green light," Jon says sagely. "Just write about the green light." He stops wiggling his toes so he can nudge Spencer's shin with his right foot.

"What's it about?" Ryan asks, wondering if the vibrations of his voice are rumbling through his body and up to Spencer's head. "I can help you with it."

"Seriously?" Spencer asks. "I knew there was a reason I kept you around."

"You mean besides my dazzling good looks?" Ryan wonders dryly, and feels Jon nudge his shin, too.

"Speak for yourself, Spence," Jon tells Spencer, grinning. "I'm just in it for his body."

"But will you respect me in the morning?" Ryan asks, keeping his face straight. He sees Jon's shoulders shake, feels Spencer's laugh against his collarbone.

"I'll help you with your math," Spencer offers quietly.

"Don't worry, I'll respect you too, baby," Ryan says, and Spencer hits him but doesn't rescind the offer.

 

 

Ryan drags himself to math the next day and pulls out his folder. He doesn't think he did the homework last night; he remembers being exhausted after finishing English and Science, and only wanting to slip into somnolence.

His math homework is there, though, eleven problems staggered across the page in the scrawl that fills his notebooks, his name and the date printed neatly at the top right corner. He must have just forgotten, he was so tired. Last night is all blurry — hazy — indistinct.

He needs more sleep, maybe. Nine hours a night doesn't seem like enough anymore.

 

 

Ryan arrives once to find Brendon and Spencer curled up together under an absurdly-colored quilt that he thinks may be Spencer's own. Ryan's not entirely sure what to say, but that's okay; it's been long enough that sometimes he thinks he doesn't need to. He can twirl words around himself like a bullfighter's cape everywhere else, but not here.

"Ryan," Spencer says, beckoning to him. Ryan follows obediently. "You want to get in?"

"Special occasion?" Ryan murmurs, already getting under the quilt. He doesn't think Trent and Brevor would approve, or anybody at school; curling up with two other boys probably, definitely, breaks some heteronormative rule of masculinity. No matter. Ryan doesn't like incomprehensible rules. Like gravity, like — no, wait, it's Brent and Trevor, not Trent and Brevor. How curious. Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice would say. (Maybe that would be an allusion, if Ryan had thought it anywhere else.) Not so curious, though, that he's going to go on wondering about it.

"No," Brendon says, burrowing his face into Ryan's chest. Something's wrong; probably something to do with his family. Ryan's not the only one who needs a circle of calm in his life. Last week, they all talked Spencer through his panic attack about his younger sister going to her first high school party. Most of the time it's enough just to be there.

"We cuddling?" Jon asks, ambling over, and lowering himself to the ground without waiting for an invitation. "Awesome. I thought that my day had been missing some cuddles."

Ryan wasn't always a cuddler, but that was a long time ago, too long to remember very clearly. Now he just wraps his arms around Brendon and lets Jon curls behind him, relaxes under Spencer's arm. Why care about a guy code when they're the only other guys around?

Jon and Spencer keep up a light dialogue, just a comforting wave of words and voices. It's nothing important, so presumably Brendon doesn't feel guilty when he interrupts about fifteen minutes later.

"It's nothing," he says, his not-quite-laugh muffled by Ryan's shirt. His breath is warm. "I mean. I just think I'm going to turn out different than they want. A lot. That's all."

"Yeah," Spencer says quietly, "but eventually, they'll get over it. Maybe not now, but they will, if they really deserve you."

"You're really mushy, Smith," Brendon complains without actually complaining. Ryan enjoys paradoxes like that.

"What about me?" Jon demands, reaching over Ryan to poke Brendon's ribs. Brendon flails, but settles back into place after a moment. "I was going to be really mushy and say that that's what we're here for, because we don't care how much you change or what you decide to do. And then I was going to say that we wouldn't care if you were a stripper, and then change my mind and tell you I would like you more if you were a stripper."

"Yeah?" Brendon asks. There are no tears spilling onto Ryan's shirt, which is probably a good thing. Brendon even sounds like he might be about to smile.

"Oh, god yes," Ryan says dryly. "Please be a stripper, Brendon."

His laugh, a real one this time, bounces against Ryan's chest to fill the air. There's a lot of air.

 

 

"Your mom," Jon tells Brendon, sounding as solemn as can be. He has to turn his head up and around to try to get a glimpse of Brendon, who is stubbornly hanging onto his back like a limpet.

Spencer and Ryan just sit and laugh at them, in between discussing drum kits and melodies and their favorite songs. Ryan let it slip that he maybe might want to do something with music, if he didn't do something with writing; Brendon had immediately gotten excited by that, but then he and Jon had gotten into an argument about chords and the Beatles that led to Brendon climbing up a protesting Jon.

"I could try to bring my drums, sometime," Spencer suggests, and Ryan smiles at him.

"That would be great. Don't you think?"

"I agree!" Brendon yells, wrapping his arms around Jon's head as Jon tries to shake him off. "Now admit defeat!"

"Okay," Jon says, so affably that Spencer yells out, "Don't trust him, Brendon!"

"Like I would," Brendon scoffs. The effect is ruined when he rests his chin on Jon's head and smiles; Jon takes the opportunity to reach up and try to forcibly remove him. Brendon kicks at his hands. "Not happening, Walker. Don't even try."

Spencer laughs and asks, "Hey, Jon, you play bass, right?"

"Yeah," Jon says breathlessly, his face turning pink from the struggle. It's strangely perfect, that they all love music, that they each play the perfect instrument to form a band. If it were a book, it might be worthy of an essay, but you can't analyse reality.

 

 

"Ryan?" Brent doesn't sound worried, not precisely, but he doesn't sound uncaring, either. Ryan closes his ears and concentrates on the feeling of his head against the lunch table. He can feel miniscule particles of plastic stick to his forehead. It's funny, thinking about how solid objects are really just millions of atoms pressed together and vibrating.

(Chemistry, biology, and Ryan says, you know I hate science.)

Maybe that's a metaphor. Ryan wouldn't be surprised.

"Hmm," Ryan responds. It's not a response. Brent is not a lead; he is a supporting character, only somewhat well drawn. Maybe he symbolises something. Ryan mutters, "I'm not existing today," and his words sink through the table and drip down to the floor.

He feels Trevor plop down next to him and noisily unwrap his sandwich. The plastic crinkles unbearably. "Hey guys. 'Sup?" Ryan can smell the sandwich filling; chicken salad. No rubbery hot dogs today. Ryan doesn't bother looking for the highlighter-yellow mustard stain. He didn't see it when he sat down; it must have finally been washed away, after a brief, flicker-flash year of existence. Or was it two years? Did it happen in junior high? Is the stain still there, just in a cafeteria on the other side of the road?

Maybe that's a metaphor, too. Everything's a metaphor these days.

"Ryan's being weird today," Brent says. The words drop out of his mouth and bounce up, up and away. They rustle Ryan's hair on their way past him.

"What a surprise," Trevor says, his voice heavy with sarcasm. Ryan imagines a cloud drifting overhead, dark and full of rain, about to let go and flood all over everyone. He imagines a lead balloon.

Ryan inhales the scent of chicken salad and exhales self-disgust. He's already sick of being at school. He's going to go home and go to sleep. He can practice guitar in his dreams. His homework will be done when he wakes up.

Brent rips off the plastic covering off his dogshit meat surprise, and Ryan thinks that there's something to be said for not existing.

 

 

Brendon sat next to Ryan the minute he saw him; he's still there now, his legs casually resting in Ryan's lap. Ryan pretends to be annoyed, but secretly he's thankful for the grounding. Spencer is on his other side, their shoulders resting warmly against each other. Ryan remembers Spencer at five, thinks of him now. The years have been good to him. They've all been good to each other.

"Glad we all ended up together," Jon says, sitting cross-legged in front of Ryan. He's wearing socks today; Ryan isn't accustomed to not being able to see Jon's toes, but that's all right. He knows them well enough that he could point out the location of every freckle. "Weird as it is."

"Fucking weird," Brendon agrees, but Ryan doesn't see what's so weird about it. The world is bizarre; they are not.

"I think it makes sense," Spencer tells them all calmly, and Ryan nudges his shoulder in thanks for saying what he can't. This is everything; if Ryan could stay here forever, he would. It's that damn alarm that gets him every time. There are ways to deal with that, though, now.

 

 

"So, kids. Anyone want to tell me what they remember from the reading last night?"

Ryan doesn't know why his science teacher bothers. Nobody ever does the reading, except maybe Ryan, and that's only because sometimes he has time now, before Spencer and Brendon and Jon arrive, and even when he doesn't Jon is usually pretty good at cajoling him into it.

He skimmed through the chapter last night, but making fun of Jon was more important at the time. Is more important now. What's the point of school? What's the point of all this? There's nothing here that's worth anything, now. It's all gravity's fault. What is gravity, anyway? Why does it exist? Why can't he just float away into space?

He wonders absently if the teacher is going to call on him. All of Ryan's teachers think he's such a good student, even though he doesn't speak up enough. They write it on the report cards that always end up tossed in the trash or shoved to the side ( _you'll never be good enough_ , but that doesn't matter now, does it?).

Ryan's teachers don't worry about him because he is a good student, so obviously he is well-adjusted. The two go together; you can't do your homework correctly if you secretly want to shoot yourself. You can't show up to class on time and know most of the answers if the inside of your brain looks more like a labyrinth than a collection of cells and gray matter. Ryan is quiet, but balanced. He has friends. He has a family. His life is fine.

casuistry - n., a seemingly sound argument based on incorrect principles.

Ryan is engaging in casuistry. Ryan is a casuist. Casuist. That sounds like some strange religious sect, one in which all the followers are known for lying and misleading others. Which has been all religious sects, in Ryan's experience, although he doesn't say things like that to Brendon.

The main incorrect principle is the idea that his teachers care.

The other incorrect principle is the rest of it; Ryan isn't quiet, except when he's awake. He isn't balanced, because there are a lot of things in his life that are good but they're not spread out evenly. What's more, people can do a lot of things well when they're fucked up on the inside. Sometimes people can do things better than usual when they're fucked up on the inside.

There are two things that are correct, though; he has friends, and he has a family. His teachers have never met either, because they're the same thing.

"People!" Mr. Hollyfeld shouts, dropping a textbook down on the table. Everyone startles awake, drifting out of whatever daydreams they had fallen into. Ryan yawns. "I know it's first period on a Monday —" Is it really? Huh. "— but that doesn't mean you can just sleep through class!"

Ryan begs to differ. Is there really any other way to get through school?

"Ryan," Mr. Hollyfeld says. "Can you tell me what the reading last night was about?"

Ryan almost doesn't hear him. He doesn't really listen in this class anymore; Jon and Spencer explain whatever he misses. "9.8 meters per second squared," he murmurs, his head resting on his hand. "Speed of acceleration due to gravity."

"Exactly," Mr. Hollyfeld says, sounding pleased. Ryan doesn't know why. It isn't as if he said it to answer his question. It just happened to be the right response. "This unit, we're going to be learning about freefall."

Now that's so bad, it's practically a plot device. Mr. Hollyfeld mumbles equations that sit on the board without making their way into Ryan's brain. Jon says that without physics, the world wouldn't exist. Ryan thinks, big deal.

 

 

"Hey, Ryan," Brent says, sitting down at the table heavily. His tray wobbles in his hands until he sets it down. "Trevor's hanging out at my place after school today. Want to come?" Ryan hasn't seen either of them outside of school for... a long time now. He doesn't keep track of the days.

He shrugs absently, drawing random patterns on the table with his fingertip. He can almost seem them, swirling just above the surface. "Dunno." How articulate. The vocabulary he uses at school has diminished. It's not like anybody understood what he said before, in any case.

"Dude, what's up with you?" Brent demands. "You've been all weird recently."

Of course, it's not as if anyone around him has a terribly expansive vocabulary, either. "Nothing's up with me," Ryan says, waving an careless hand. He's not sure he intended to. Sometimes his limbs seem to move of their own volition.

"You look like a fucking ghost, man," Brent continues doggedly. Ryan appreciates this; it shows character. He's not sure if he's the audience or a main character, but he enjoys it nonetheless.

A ghost, though. That's funny, because — "Don't tell that to Brendon," Ryan says, smiling. "He'll insist on watching Casper about ten million times."

Brent shovels meatloaf into his mouth with a plastic spork and swallows heavily, his Adam's apple drifting up and down. "Who the hell is Brendon?" he asks off-handedly, as if the question doesn't make Ryan almost lose the last breath in his lungs.

"Friend of mine," Ryan manages to tell him, stealing air to do it. He taps his fingers against the tabletop, twitches his toes inside his sneakers. The cafeteria, already bustling, seems to get louder, but he can hear Brent far too clearly.

"You go home and go to sleep every day," Brent says, accidentally spraying a few flecks of strangely-colored meat over his tray. It's almost enough to make Ryan become a vegetarian. "What, is he an imaginary friend?"

He's not —

This isn't —

It's not like —

Ryan's —

It —

This —

He —

They —

No. Nonononononononononononononononono. Yes. What?

It takes far too long to answer the question because Ryan can't _think_ , can't breathe can't can't can't can't — but Brent doesn't seem to mind, just sits there eating his undercooked, plastic lunch.

"Never mind," Ryan says eventually, because that's all there is left.

 

 

Ryan fakes his father's voice and calls himself in sick the next day. He hides in his room until his father is gone for the day, and then he sits in his room and determinedly doesn't fall asleep, no matter how much his bed is calling to him.

He shouldn't — just because Brent doesn't know them doesn't mean they aren't real. Just because he only sees them in his dreams doesn't mean —

God, this is sick. He's sick. There's something wrong with him, there's something crashing in on him, all his words are crumbling and fading down to just two.

Not.

Real. ( _Jon —_ )

Not.

Real. ( _Brendon —_ )

Not.

Real. ( _Spencer —_ )

Not.

Real. (—)

Ryan stays up as late as he can. When he can't put it off any longer, he takes a sleeping pill and lets himself fall into bed. He doesn't dream.

 

 

Ryan walks to school every morning, his backpack pulling him down. Sometimes he sees Brent or Trevor before class. Sometimes he doesn't. His locker always sticks when he tries to open it. He makes his way to science, if it's a Monday, Wednesday, or Friday. He goes to English if it's Tuesday or Thursday. The teachers tell him he's learning. He nods.

Here's the thing: all communication is just to get something. It sounds bad, but it's basic. The boy sitting to Ryan's left wants to hear the sound of his own voice; he talks. His teachers want to give information; they talk. The girl in the front of them room wants to get attention; she talks. Ryan's dad wants to make Ryan into nothing; he talks. You want, you want, you want, you talk.

But the problem with writing, his English teacher tells him, is that you can never say what authors intend. Even if they say they've told you, you can't believe them. You can never know for sure what they're trying to do, so you just have to think about the way they're saying it, instead.

Here's the other thing: everything in Ryan's head might as well be a story, anyway. It's just the plot itself that doesn't make sense.

 

 

"Hey, Ryan," Brent says, looking up at him. He's sitting in Trevor's driveway, trapping his skateboard between his feet.

"'Bout fucking time," Trevor calls from a few feet away. Today is a Friday. It's the first day this week that Ryan hasn't stayed in the library until nine. He doesn't think he could get away with it when they don't have school the next day.

"Hey," Ryan says. What is he trying to get here? Trying to make himself seem normal, probably. Like the months of isolation didn't really happen. It's so hard to know his own intentions.

"You ready to mess?" Brent asks. He waves a hand at Ryan's skateboard. It had been languishing in the corner of his room for ages. His guitar is there now.

"Yeah," Ryan says, shrugging. He'll probably fall down. He'll pretend it's just because he's clumsy and not because gravity is out to get him.

"Dude, can you believe Ms. Forlan?" Trevor complains, kicking his backpack.

"I can't believe she's making us write a fucking essay in a week," Brent grumbles.

"Fuck, I know," Ryan groans. He pauses. "She looked really hot today, though." He doesn't actually think Ms. Forlan is that hot, despite her propensity for wearing short skirts.

"Oh, hell yes," Trevor agrees. "If she wasn't such a bitch, I would be all over that."

"Yeah right, asshole," Brent snorts. He leans over and punches Trevor's arm. "You're scared shitless of her."

"Don't be a douchebag," Trevor says.

Ryan puts his own skateboard on the ground and pushes it back and forth with one foot. It's too easy. And not even in the good way, the way it was easy to hang out with —

Motherfucking fuckity fuck. No.

"Ryan?" Brent asks, giving him a weird look. Ryan'll probably have to get used to that one for a few weeks, until they think he's proven that he's back to normal.

"What, you tards done already?" he asks, and lets Brent and Trevor laugh and try to hit him. Too fucking easy.

 

 

Ryan comes home from the library too early one day, or maybe his father is just up too late. Sometimes he's passed out by the time that Ryan gets back, or only gets home after Ryan is safely ensconced in his bedroom. Ryan prefers the former. At least then he knows where his dad is.

Brent and Trevor know, a little. They don't ask about it anymore.

Tonight, Ryan gets a few bruises. Nothing big, nothing special. It's more like gym class than anything else. It doesn't happen often; just when his dad is pissed, mad and drunk enough for Ryan to forget that he's human.

Spencer says, said, that "not often" was still too much. He wanted Ryan to stay at someone's house, to have somewhere to go, but Ryan thinks it's pointless. He was right, too, because obviously Spencer's opinions never mattered.

His dad gets bored after a little while and Ryan escapes upstairs, shouted words still ringing in his ears. It all starts to get the same after a while, except for how every word keeps sounding more and more true.

Ryan is a fuck up who's fucked in the head. He's still too skinny, too quiet, too weird. He thinks he might like guys. His only two friends have no idea who he is. His mom took all his siblings but left him. His dad is an alcoholic who sometimes hits him. He's aloof, ambivalent when he's not apathetic, so wretched he can't even work up enough bitterness to try to get out of this place. It's no fucking wonder that his subconscious had to create three people who could actually care about him.

It pisses him off, though. His mind was supposed to be the one thing he could trust, and it lied to him.

 

 

It takes three weeks before the sleeping pills run out. Ryan starts taking nighttime cold medication. He doesn't have a cough, but he's willing to pretend if the drugs will let him sleep without dreaming of them. (That object did not actually refer back to a subject, so here's a hint: Ryan is not worried about dreaming of the drugs. One must have clarity in all things, except for one's self.)

It doesn't fully work. He doesn't dream of them, but he does still remember his dreams. You always have dreams, after all, you just don't remember them, and Ryan may have learned that from someone who doesn't exist but that doesn't mean it's not true.

He has the strangest dreams. Maybe they mean something, but he doesn't want them to. Besides, the only thing he knows about dream analysis is Freud, who was a pervert and would probably just tell him he was in love with his mother, instead of three boys who he created in the back of his head.

 

 

"Hey, Ryan," Melissa Frank whispers in the middle of class, when they're supposed to be working on translating pointless phrases.

Ryan looks up at her. It's the most acknowledgement that he's willing to give. He thought Melissa was hot years ago, before everything. Now nobody really compares, and isn't that fucking narcissistic.

"Can you help me with this translation?"

Trevor would tell Ryan that this is it, he's in, he just has to sweet talk her a little and he could score a few dates out of it, maybe even score more than that. Brent would tell him to not get his hopes up, it's just help translating, but still, she did ask him instead of David Risman, who sits near them in Spanish and is on the football team to boot.

(Spencer would say, "Just fucking talk to her, moron.")

"Sure," Ryan says, and he helps her translate her 'if' clause — "if I sleep, then I will be rested" — into Spanish. Then he turns back to his own work and doesn't talk to anyone else for the rest of the period.

 

Ryan dreams: He wanders through a meadow filled with umbrellas and helps a stray pigeon find its way home. With perfect dream-logic, the meadow becomes a sea, but Ryan isn't in a boat; instead, he hovers half in the water, and half out. He doesn't bother treading water. When he looks down, the water is clear, always has been, except when it wasn't. He can see his feet. He rests his hands against the surface of the water and waits for something else to happen. This is not the strangest dream he has had while on cold meds.

He had vaguely hoped that a large flock of birds would come fly him away, but instead he hears voices.

"Ryan!" they yell. "Ryan!"

Ryan wants to tell them that he's right here, he's floating, but if he ever talks in a dream then he wakes himself up.

"Where is he?" a worried voice asks. "He hasn't been here in ages."

"He'll be back. He has to."

The voices are faint, whispery, but still recogniseable for all that. Dream-logic disappears and is replaced by real logic. Ryan is floating in the ocean, and if he doesn't get out of there then he will drown. Maybe not in water, but he'll drown nonetheless.

The water disappears and the walls shoot up, grey stone and red brick. Now there's a piece of figurative language than Ryan can appreciate becoming literal.

After that night, the walls stay. Ryan even ventures off the cold meds to see what happens, but there's no discernable change: just Ryan in a maze, surrounded by stone on all sides, moss beginning to grow in cracks and corners. Just walls, ground and sky; nothing else. Ryan is so easy to read that he's practically transparent (except when he's not), but he still finds it restful.

 

 

Ryan stops paying attention in most of his classes. He only does his homework because he has the vague idea that he needs to get into college and out of this place. He's not going to be able to do it through music; that was always a stupid idea. He'll just have to learn to trust his mind again, if he can.

He looks at his mind critically, tries to decide what made it fail. His only experience with any sort of analysis is literary, but the trouble is that none of this seems to fit into any sort of literary frame. There is no shaping metaphor, no real symbolism. There is no allegory; Spencer can't be Reason, because would Reason have gleefully shared his tale of almost blowing up a lightpole? Sometimes Ryan thinks Brendon could be Childhood, but Childhood would not have been able to grow up so quickly. And Jon, Jon ought to be Calm, but Ryan cannot picture any representative of Calm sitting on Spencer and refusing to get up until Spencer agreed to sing a kareoke duet.

Besides, what do Calm, Reason and Childhood have to do with each other? They don't fit, and Ryan needs something that fits, but he can't find any textual evidence. No fitting archetypes come readily to mind. They're all too real. They're not even supporting characters, confidantes, expository devices.

If Jon, Spencer and Brendon were figments of his imagination, why did they have lives of their own? If Ryan is narcissistic enough to invent three people just so he would have someone to pay attention to him, why did they have their own problems? Why were they not always there when he arrived?

Why why why why why, with no answers except what Ryan can pretend makes sense. None of it makes sense. Then again, Ryan's not sure he makes complete sense either.

He can't even decide whether it's a comedy or a tragedy until he remembers that his English teacher told him that to the Greeks, all "comedy" meant was that nobody died.

Comedy, then. It just lacks any sort of conclusion.

 

 

The walls are back. The moss is still there, but there's graffiti, too. Ryan traces the slick letters with a single forefinger, reading them slowly.

RYAN RYAN RYAN RYAN RYAN

It's in three different handwritings. Ryan's subconscious is beginning to become annoyingly persistent. Shouldn't it realise by now that Ryan refuses to pay attention?

Somehow, he's not surprised that there's a brush and a can of paint by his feet. He smoothes broad strokes across the wall, watching the letters appear, letting them sink behind his eyes.

NOT REAL

He moves on, to another wall, a clean wall. The paintbrush drips at he lifts it up.

THINGS FALL APART. THE CENTER CANNOT HOLD.

"Um, what?" he hears faintly, although he refuses to name the voice.

"It has to be a poem." Always so impatient with poetry; why can't they just say what they mean? It's the heartbeat. "He usually makes sense, except when he's quoting something."

"It's a poem about the end of the world." Without physics, the world wouldn't exist, Ryan.

"Do we have to translate him, too?" There's a lot of air. "I just want to find him."

Ryan hides behind his walls, and refuses to be found. Intention is everything, even if you can't divine it.

 

 

Ryan wakes up every morning and goes to school. At the end of school, he goes to the library, or to Brent or Trevor's, or to his house. Sometimes his father will be recogniseably human; sometimes not. He does his homework. His grades dropped right after, but he has nothing else to do besides work on keeping them up.

He navigates Brent and Trevor the same way he always has. He buys actual sleeping pills and, if he ever remembers his dream from the night before, stays awake for so long that he passes out. His mind is always blank in the morning after that.

He sends in his college applications, because it's what everyone else is doing, and gets in with a scholarship he can't even remember applying for. His father says, "Good job," and nothing else. Ryan can't bring himself to hate him, because he can't bring himself to feel anything.

He packs up his guitar with the rest of his crap and brings it to his dorm room. His roommate moves out after two weeks; he says it's because the dorm is too loud, but it might be because of Ryan. Ryan doesn't care. He has a single now.

He goes to classes and applies himself and writes words that mean nothing. He avoids parties and other people. He sees flashes of familiar faces and deliberately turns away. He is not swimming anywhere. He floats. He breathes in and out, because he's supposed to.

He used to be ambivalent, but he's made a choice now. He's still going nowhere, but in theory it's better than living in a dream.

 

 

One of Ryan's quasi-friends on the hall tells him that someone asked about him, described him pretty exactly. Ryan doesn't think about it much. He tries not to think about things that have no forthcoming answers, now. He just ignores it.

And then. And then.

And then he opens the door when someone knocks, and three faces stare back at him.

"Finally," Spencer says, pulling the door farther open. "It was practically impossible to find you."

"Oh my god," Brendon agrees emphatically. "We should have exchanged addresses, not just cities. You know, before _someone_ decided to stop talking to us."

"Although it might have been for the best," Jon says thoughtfully. "I mean, we might never have actually met in person if we weren't all trying to find him."

"Fine, it was a little unhealthy to spend so much time in a dream, but that doesn't mean that excommunication is the answer," Spencer declares snippily, crossing his arms across his chest, and Ryan can't deal with this in the hallway of his dorm. Jon and Spencer and Brendon exist with a blank background, not outlined against beige walls under fluorescent lighting. Jon's flip-flop-bedecked feet are not meant to stand on blue and white tiles.

"No," he says. "No, you're not real. I don't know what's going on, but you're not actually here."

They share a glance, and Ryan feels irrationally jealous of what his hallucinations have been bonding over while he hasn't been with them. Ignoring them.

Obviously, the problem of Ryan's reluctance has been discussed already, because Brendon and Jon immediately wander farther down the hallway, each finding a separate person to talk to.

"Hey, I like your shoes," Brendon tells one boy, at the same time that Jon asks a blond girl, "Which was is the bathroom?" Both boy and girl respond. This is not just Ryan having multiple personality disorder; this is Ryan's friends — Ryan's potentially real friends — knowing that he has read Fight Club too many times.

"Real," Spencer says, but Ryan isn't willing to let him get off that easily.

"How did you find me? How did you get into the dorm?" he demands, his throat beginning to feel hoarse. He's terrified of them, of himself, of what this could mean.

"The dorm was easy," Spencer says, leaning against the door frame as Brendon and Jon return. "We just told them that we were friends of yours and trying to save you from a life of anti-social misery."

"Apparently you've got a reputation," Brendon contributes, kicking Ryan's foot and grinning. Ryan isn't sure if he's ready to be inducted into their circle of easy touches and shared smiles (back into it, that is). He can't even tell what's going on in his head anymore.

"And you said you were from Las Vegas, so we looked up all the Rosses," Jon tells Ryan. Ryan swallows horror at the idea that they might have met his father, but Jon smiles at him and adds, "Then we decided that there were way too many Rosses, and we just looked up your friends Brent and Trevor instead, because you said they were still in high school."

Ryan chokes. "What?"

"Yup. Told 'em we were old friends of yours and wanted to surprise you. They gave us your college and dorm." Jon shrugs, as if he hasn't just upended Ryan's life while practically stalking him. Strangely enough, Ryan might not mind. "Nice guys."

"You're not —" Words fail Ryan, but then again, with them, he's never needed words.

"Ryan," Spencer says kindly. How long has Ryan known those blue eyes? Longer than forever, maybe. Not long enough. "Can we come inside?"

Wordlessly, Ryan stands back from the door and lets them in.


End file.
